Easter Sunday

Holy Resurrection of the Lord. Contemporary Georgian Icon. Egg tempera on board.

The second reading for today’s Easter mass is Colossians 3: 1-4, and it also forms the very short reading which comes at the very end of the liturgical hour of Prime during the entire Paschal season, as one last brief but profound meditation before beginning the other activities of the day: ‘If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you will appear with him in glory.’ 

I first started thinking more about this passage a couple of years ago and find that it recurs to me periodically, usually when I’m out for a walk, when I least expect it. It constitutes a real challenge to us who are otherwise immersed in all manner of daily pleasures, troubles and concerns, and, spiritually speaking, this is really a dangerous state of affairs. As Pope Francis I said just yesterday at the Easter Vigil in Rome: ‘Our daily problems and worries can wrap us up in ourselves, in sadness and bitterness, and that is where death is.’ So, no matter what we are doing, if we can pause for a moment and try to raise our hearts and minds to God, to the heavenly realm of saints and angels to which we are called, and which lies literally a mere heartbeat away, then we can begin to put into practice what St. Paul exhorts the Colossians to do in today’s reading. 

Often we can get a new insight into a scriptural passage by looking at a different translation. In this regard, I think the Latin Vulgate text can be really helpful. Where the English says ‘Think of what is above,’ the Vulgate says ‘quae sursum sunt sapite’, and ‘sapite’ has a whole range of meanings, from ‘think’ to ‘taste’ to ‘discern’ to ‘have a taste for’ to ‘be wise as a result of discerning.’ May we all not only think of what is in heaven, then, but taste, discern, develop a taste for, and learn from discerning the life to which we are called as members of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. May we see its hope and consolation shining brightly through whatever darkness dims our days. 

‘This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ Now a very fine meditation on this response to the psalm sung in today’s liturgy comes from Blessed John Henry Newman: ‘We have had enough of weariness, and dreariness, and listlessness, and sorrow, and remorse. We have had enough of this troublesome world. We have had enough of its noise and din. Noise is its best music. But now there is stillness; and it is a stillness that speaks…such is our blessedness now. Calm and serene days have begun; and Christ is heard in them, and his “still small voice”, because the world speaks not. Let us only put off the world, and we put on Christ…May that unclothing be unto us a clothing upon of things invisible and imperishable! May we grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, season after season, year after year, till he takes us to himself…into the kingdom of his Father and our Father, his God and our God.’ (From the sermon ‘The Difficulty of Realizing Sacred Privileges.’)

Holy Saturday

Now the scripture readings for the Easter Vigil which will be celebrated tonight begin with the creation account found in the Book of Genesis, then proceed to take us through several Old Testament passages before we ever get to those of the New: as the great patristic writers point out repeatedly, God has worked dramatically not only in our personal history as individuals, but in the history of Israel and of the entire creation as well. ‘God said, “let there be light!” And there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and he divided the light from the darkness.’ Benedict XVI, in a homily given on July 4, 2012, spoke provocatively of this Genesis account when he said: ‘To say that God created light means that God created the world as a space for knowledge and truth, as a space for encounter and freedom, as a space for good and for love. Matter is fundamentally good, being itself is good. And evil does not come from God-made being, rather it comes into existence only through denial. It is a “no”.’

Let us then allow ourselves one last and most serious examination of conscience before we arrive at the great feast of Easter. Because if I deny the fundamental dignity and goodness of others, I run the serious risk of bringing evil into existence in their lives and mine through dismissal, lack of regard, and cruelty of many kinds. If I approach each new day with a spirit of cynicism and negativity, then I bring evil into existence where it did not exist before, through denying that God has created each day to be good and filled with grace and peace. If I ignore the gifts which God pours forth upon me even as I slumber, and through each day from the rising of the sun to its setting, then I bring evil into my own life–and most likely also into the lives of others, through the sad ‘fallout’ of evil which will consequently affect those who must encounter me–by denying that the Lord has already given me far more than I will ever have time, in this life at least, to thank him for. Let us not take what is not only good, but radiant with goodness, toss it onto the trash heap of life and replace it with evil which needn’t ever have come into existence in the first place.

In the same homily, Benedict XVI speaks of the new light of the Resurrection which breaks through the solar eclipse of Jesus’ passion and death. But how is that light to reach us, so that we will cease to wander aimlessly, lost otherwise forever in the darkness of our own sin and brokenness? ‘Through the sacrament of baptism, and through our profession of faith, the Lord has built a bridge across to us, through which that new day reaches us.’ Let us keep this vivid image of the bridge continually before us, then, as we prepare to enter more deeply into the mystery of the Lord’s Resurrection from the dead. And not only the bridge itself, but both the utter darkness and pointlessness which lie behind and below it, which we must flee at all costs, and the dazzling new day of grace and consolation to which the bridge mercifully leads. 

Wednesday of Holy Week

Giotto di Bondone. ‘The Betrayal of Christ’. Fresco, about 1302. Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy. 

For many centuries in the Roman Rite, the prayers which herald the arrival of the Sacred Triduum have rung out on Holy Thursday at the very beginning of the Office of Vigils and are taken from Psalm 68 (69). This psalm also serves as the responsorial psalm at mass on Wednesday of Holy Week, and the words I have in mind are these: ‘Zeal for your house consumes me.’ Traditionally ascribed to King David, well known in the Old Testament for his zeal for the house of God and his desire to built a great temple in Jerusalem, the early Christians soon began to apply these words, and the rest of the psalm which surrounds them, to Christ himself. And especially those passages which speak of the sufferings and betrayals which are often the result of zeal for God’s house, as in: ‘The insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me. / Insult has broken my heart, and I am weak. / I looked for sympathy, but there was none; / For consolers, not one could I find.’ The psalm is replete with such images.

Now here is a meditation we might do well to focus upon intently on this day: we become an integral part of what consumes us. And this is just as true, even more so, actually, in the spiritual life as in that of the body and mind. When grains of wheat are ground into bread and baked, and we consume that bread by eating and ingesting it, it become metabolized within us to such a complete extent that it actually becomes part of our very bodies. To put it rather crudely: we are what we eat. Now we are used to thinking of this literally, as well as spiritually, when we consider the effect which the Eucharist, devoutly received and consumed, has upon the Christian person who is thus made more integrally and deeply than ever a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church, united body and soul to the Lord himself and to one’s brothers and sisters in the Lord. But let us turn the process around for a moment and try to imagine: if I am consumed, not by zeal for God’s house, not by love of God and my neighbor, but by things truly detrimental to a life of faith and hope and love, then what will become of me?

This is where one’s personal list of sins comes in, that matter for confession which we bring to our spiritual father most especially during these days of penitence and prayer. But let us truly feel the weight of what we may be doing. If I am consumed by resentment and hatred and envy, am I prepared to be metabolized, as it were, by these sins, a mere meal for the devouring, and become an integral part of them forever? If I am consumed by inordinate lusts and desires of whatever kind, am I prepared to be literally subsumed into those appetites, masticated and digested by them to the extent that I eventually lose all power to extricate myself from their rapacious demands? If I am consumed by love of self, to the point where it becomes my daily food and drink, am I ready to become forever that into which I have spent a lifetime desiring to be transformed? ‘Zeal for your house consumes me.’ May these words be not only our beginning, but our guiding and sustaining meditation throughout all the days of the Holy Triduum whose threshold we are about to cross. 

Monday of Holy Week

Giotto di Bondone. ‘Christ Entering Jerusalem’. Fresco painted between 1305-1306. Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua, Italy.

Whenever I gaze, during its final faintly glowing moments of existence, at the barely burning wick of a candle, about to go out, I inevitably think of the last earthly moments of a loved one at the approach of death. Now this is a bittersweet thought: bitter in remembrance of the impending loss, sweet in remembrance of a life which, though about to depart, was nevertheless with me still. And yet, from the point of view of Christian faith, though the body may die, the souls of the just are always safe in the hands God and thus never extinguished. However life may crush us, and end in the severing of body from soul, we are not obliterated as persons, and we commend our departed loved ones to the care and wisdom of a merciful God. Perhaps this is partly what the first reading from today’s liturgy (Isaiah 42: 1-7) is getting at when the prophet, speaking of the coming Messiah, tells us: ‘A bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench.’ Though our earthly bodies, like a burned out wick, will eventually give way to darkness, to ashes and the silence of night, yet the flame of our life continues to glow and give light, safe in God’s hands, awaiting the bright and joyous morning of the resurrection of the dead. And it is to our Messiah that we look to see us through the darkness and to keep our flame alive as we soldier on into the unknown with faith.

As today’s responsorial psalm tells us: ‘I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living!’

In today’s Gospel (John 12: 1-11), Martha serves at table while her sister Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with costly aromatic oil, which fills the house with its intense fragrance as Jesus reclines at table with his friend Lazarus. Now this is another way of telling us that the piety and reverent service offered by the saints to the Lord is a pleasing fragrance which fills the house of God, the Church. What praises can we offer to God, and what service can we render? As we make our way through Holy Week, may our prayers, our acts of penitence, fasting and charity be pleasing to God and help to prepare us for a more profound immersion in the Paschal mystery than, in our sinfulness, we have experienced before.  

Keeping the Lord’s Word

‘The Lord Teaching in the Temple.’ Tempera on wood. Russia, about 1800.

Sometimes churchgoers who are very ‘active’ in their parishes (attending meetings of parish groups, sitting on councils and committees, being heavily involved in fundraising, etc.) can be very judgmental of others who do not do these things, as if such people were somehow not ‘active’ in parish life. But I do not see it that way at all. It would be quite possible to spend one’s entire life as a regular (or even irregular, depending on one’s circumstances) churchgoer without ever being much involved in the external activities of one’s parish, and yet have an intensely active inner life. 

This, to me, is partly what Jesus is getting at in the gospel reading for today’s liturgy (John 8: 51-59) in which he says: ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.’ Because, although keeping God’s word will of course also eventually involve living one’s life according to it, the initial and perduring ‘keeping’ can and should be taken quite literally: we hear God’s word and hold it closely within us, meditating upon it, considering it, endeavoring with God’s grace to penetrate and, as best we can, to comprehend it. This is the absolutely essential condition of soul which must be present if one is ever to act externally on that word. Thus a devout person might well never sing along with the hymns and prayers at church, might rarely repeat the words of the Nicene Creed along with the priest and deacon and choir, might never engage in religious ‘talk’ around others or feel a need to testify verbally to his faith when chatting with friends. Yet he could literally spend a lifetime devoutly considering the word of God which he has heard, along with the prayers of the church, and be brought deeply into the life of Christ as a result. Mary herself is another fine example of this. In response to the events surrounding the Lord’s Nativity, and again at the time when the child Jesus was found teaching in the temple, as the gospel accounts tell us, she ‘treasured all these things in her heart.’ Let her be our model and guide.

One more point: at the end of today’s gospel reading, when Jesus is about to be stoned by those who oppose his words, he vanishes and departs from the temple. Now I have always thought this was simply because his time to die had not yet come. But St. Gregory the Great in one of his homilies offers another explanation. ‘Our Redeemer’, he says, ‘having become a human being among humans, teaches us some things by his words and others by his example. What does he tell us by this example, except that even when it is possible for us to resist we should humbly avoid the anger of the proud?’ All of which reminds me of the beautiful words of the ancient hymn sung very early in the morning in monasteries just after the Office of Lauds and at the beginning of the First Hour, ‘Jam lucis orto sidere’: ‘Let us temper and hold our tongues, / lest the horror of strife resound: / Let us carefully guard our eyes, / lest they take in what is vain.’ 

Christ Our Light

The Four Evangelists, from The Book of Kells. Illuminated Manuscript,  Ireland A.D. 800. 

The first time I slept at our dacha in the forest, I was somewhat appalled at the utter blackness and silence of the night. It seemed impenetrable, so accustomed was I to the muted darkness of the city and the distant sounds to be found there at all times. But in the forest it was not that way: my eyes could make out nothing whatever as I lay there in bed, nor could I perceive any sounds, so complete was the silence of the woods. It was a frightening feeling at first, and I found myself wondering: could this be what death feels like, to find oneself totally surrounded with nothing but darkness, with no physical perceptions of any kind? If so, could death be an experience of sheer disembodied dark horror?

We do not know, of course, and the Holy Fathers have warned us repeatedly not to enquire too deeply into the mysteries of the afterlife, lest we be led badly astray. Yet Christ tells us in the gospel reading for yesterday’s Liturgy (from John 8: 12-20): ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’ We can see this in two senses, moreover: in terms of our life in this world, and in terms of what happens to us in the next. In both, he is our light, and we will need that light, during whatever days God gives us on this earth, and with the separation of the soul from the body when the sum of our years has played itself out. For the faithful follower of Christ, as the ancient Fathers have often pointed out, it is the grace of God and the mysterious presence of the Spirit in the soul, working invisibly now, which will be made bodily manifest in the holy resurrection of the just, when the children of God will be revealed. Now, and then, it is Christ the light of the world who will guide us on our way. But not if we choose to obstruct the light. With regard to this, as the Prophet Isaiah tells us: ‘Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.’ (Is. 55: 6).

The responsorial psalm from yesterday’s Liturgy gives us a very comforting perspective on what kind of guide Christ, our light, is. He is the Good Shepherd: ‘Even though I walk in the dark valley, I fear no evil / for you are at my side / With your rod and your staff that give me courage.’ Some of the earliest patristic commentators have noted that the ‘rod’ mentioned here can be seen as a rod of discipline: the spiritual life is not always easy, and God disciplines and corrects us out of love. And the staff is that of the shepherd: it guides us in right paths, and may take the form of the scriptures themselves, of the writings of the Holy Fathers, of the example of the lives of the saints, of the prayers and hymns of the Liturgy and Divine Services, and ultimately of the promptings of the Spirit himself within. Here is a prayer I have very recently made my own: ‘Father in heaven, help me to hear the voice of your Son throughout the day and the night, to be numbered always among the sheep of his flock, to follow wherever he leads, to be led at last safely home.’ 

The Woman Taken In Adultery

Vasily Polenov. ‘Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery’, 1888. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 

Jesus gives several gifts to the woman taken in adultery in today’s gospel (John 8: 1-11), but one of them is probably often overlooked: he gives her back her dignity as a person. The scene is easy to imagine: discovered in some act both embarrassing and subject to the most severe of punishments in the Palestine of her time, dragged through a violent crowd by religious authorities to the feet of a holy man named Jesus, she faces immediate death of a hideously painful and shameful kind. Now we can only try to imagine what effect all this has had on her concept of herself as a person: her adulterous behavior, her public exposure and humiliation, her fear of death and a kind of perpetual disgrace which would have attached itself also to whatever children and relatives she would leave behind. Yet the Lord restores what she has thrown away and what has been taken from her by others. And, we can well imagine, he has raised her to a new inner conception of who she is, a sense of her own dignity and value as a person. Whether we have ever been guilty of such sins as hers or not, we know what it feels like to have our personal dignity restored in acknowledging our faults before God and in receiving God’s absolution in sacramental confession. So we should take this gospel account very personally indeed.

A friend of mine, who did not grow up in a particularly religious family, told me that as the years went by he gradually came to thank his parents more and more for the tremendous graces of baptism and basic religious instruction they had given him in his early youth. After engaging in various types of what he later came to regard as not only pointless but sinful behavior, he suddenly realized that he felt personally degraded. And this was the beginning of his real conversion to Christ, because he knew that he most desperately desired for his personal dignity to be restored, a process which had most essentially begun in his long ago baptism, of course, but which he felt had been seriously compromised in the decades which had passed since. The degradation of the human person, he ardently believed, was exactly the opposite of what faith and life in Christ were all about. Perhaps the woman taken in adultery would have agreed.

I don’t know whether our era is one in which the moral debauchery of the individual person is rampant or not. But I do believe that the various means available to us through our 2000 year old tradition, through the grace of God, have tremendous power to raise us up from whatever personal degradation we have experienced in our lives. Daily meditation on the scriptures; readings from the writings of the Holy Fathers and Mothers of our faith; the Liturgy of the Hours or Divine Services prayed throughout the day; acts of penitence, fasting, almsgiving and mercy; participation in the sacramental life of the Church: however our souls have been tarnished, by ourselves or by others, all these practices can offer us new dignity and hope. Because they can take deep root within us, raising us up from whatever depths to which we have sunk.  

Great Adventures

St. Anthony the Great and St. Paul of Thebes. Icon from the Coptic Museum, Cairo, Egypt.

An advertising billboard frequently encountered in our part of the country a few years ago carried the slogan: ‘Great adventures rarely begin at home.’ Now I can’t recall the product being sold, but it could not have been the spiritual life, because that is an adventure which most definitely not only begins, but finds its entire progress and completion, in its most essential sense, exclusively at home: in the interior of one’s heart and soul. That is not to say, of course, that our spiritual life should be some kind of dream world, unconnected to others and the world around us. Or that it would could not include pilgrimages to distant holy sites which would bring us not only inner but also physically demanding and externally exploratory adventure. Yet the greatest and most fundamental adventure of the spiritual life finds its locus within. Here the precision of spacial terms escapes us, so much so that the prayerful person might well look up into a vast night sky shimmering with countless numbers of stars and say: ‘Each individual soul is just so vast, in terms of the depth of mystery which it contains as God’s creature, yet God in his holiness is infinitely more limitless than that!’ 

I read an interesting short article by Dylan Pahman recently, entitled ‘The Desert Fathers as Spiritual Explorers’ (http://blog.acton.org/archives/35117-the-desert-fathers-as-spiritual-explorers.html), which examines the idea that early desert dwellers like St. Anthony the Great and St. Paul of Thebes, whose anchoritic and other ascetic labors in the wildernesses of Egypt and Syria both preceded and served as the basis for the various types of monastic communities which would soon develop in the early Church: they were the externally primitive but internally advanced prototypes of the much later explorers of the physical planet which led to the discoveries of new continents and lands. You might want to check it out. Magellan and Columbus were concerned with winds and storms at sea, with newly encountered indigenous populations and geographical wonders. But the early Desert Fathers looked within, to how God had created them, to who God might be in himself, and to how the serious follower of Christ might pray and live in order to find salvation and peace. 

As the Orthodox approach Forgiveness Sunday and the beginning of the Great Fast on March 18, and Roman Catholics and other western Christians prepare to observe the 5th Sunday of Lent (or the beginning of Passiontide for those who follow the pre-Conciliar calendar), we might well look to the Desert and other Church Fathers for guidance along the way. Such as St. Isaac the Syrian, who tells us: ‘Someone who bears a grudge while he prays is like a person who sows in the sea and expects to reap a harvest.’ Or St. Gregory of Nyssa: ‘Virtue is a light and buoyant thing, and all who live in her way “fly like clouds”, as Isaiah says, “and as doves with their young ones”, while sin is a heavy affair, as another of the prophets says, “sitting upon a talent of lead”‘. For we are called to look within, as Psalm 83(84) reminds us, while addressing the Lord: ‘Happy are those whose strength is in You, in whose hearts are the roads to Zion.’ 

St. Theophan the Recluse on Prayer

Giotto di Bondone. ‘St. Francis Giving His Cloak to a Poor Man’, 1295-1300. Fresco. Upper Church, Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi, Italy.

Now the follower of Christ today might well see in today’s first mass reading (Wisdom 2: 12-22) a fine description of the attitude of those parts of the contemporary world which seem increasingly vocal in their opposition to Christianity. If it is an accurate description, then the faithful ought not to be surprised by this. St. Paul, after all, at the very beginning of the Christian era, spoke clearly of how Christians would be misunderstood, even hated, just as Jesus himself had been during his time on earth. And St. Paul advises, in Philippians 2: 15: ”Be blameless and sincere children of God, without reproof, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.’ And St. Peter, as in Acts 2:40, had much the same message: ‘With many other words he testified to them and encouraged them, saying, “Be saved from this perverse generation.”‘ The Lord too had at times been vehement in his references to the generation into which he had been born, describing it as corrupt, always seeking signs and devoid of faith. All this we are to consider soberly.

Yet, in the face of all this, it is not the Christian’s calling to judge others: we are repeatedly warned in the scriptures against such hateful and destructive behavior. Rather, we are to immerse ourselves in the life of God, given to us as pure grace, to such a total extent that we have no time or energy left for being indignant with or angry at the world. Yet we are also asked to take to heart St. Paul’s pointed injunction in 2 Corinthians 6: 17, ‘Wherefore come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean, and I will receive you’, a passage reminiscent of God’s command to the Israelites in the Old Testament not to fraternize with or imitate the ways of the Canaanites. St. Paul’s words remind us that the ways of Christians are often very unlike the ways of the world, sometimes requiring a very conscious and determined separation of the former from the latter. 

Nowhere does the Gospel of Christ call us to spiteful or angry confrontation with others. If we are indeed to live differently, however, here are some positive pieces of spiritual direction from St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894), Russian Orthodox Bishop of Tambov, who withdrew from public life in order to live in near total seclusion, devoting himself to study, writing and prayer: ‘Descend with your attention into the heart; stand there before the Lord and admit nothing sinful to enter there. In this is the entire activity of inner struggle.’ ‘Attention to that which transpires in the heart and proceeds from it–this is the chief activity of the Christian life.’ ‘You must kill egoism. If you don’t kill it yourself, then the Lord, hammer-blow after hammer-blow, shall send various misfortunes, so as to crush this stone.’ And: ‘Mercilessness to oneself, readiness to perform any favor to others and the surrender of oneself entirely to the Lord with a prayerful abiding in him–these are the creators of the spiritual life.’

Desert Fathers On Prayer

Edward Henry Holder. ‘Rephidim, Desert of Sinai’, 1877. Tameside Museums and Galleries, The Astley Cheetham Art Collection. 

More than one of the great ascetic Fathers of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts has noted this fact: what we give ourselves to most readily is what we love. Now that is fine when we give ourselves to prayer and good works, to love of God and meditation upon the scriptures, to the emptying of ourselves in favor of charity toward others. As St. Ephrem the Syrian said: ‘Whenever I have meditated upon You, I have acquired a veritable treasure from You. Whatever aspect of You I have contemplated, a stream has flowed from You; there is no way I can contain it.’ But then St. Ephrem goes on to add: ‘Your fountain, Lord, is hidden from the person who does not thirst for you.’ And if that fountain is hidden from me, because I do not thirst for it or seek it, what then? I am left to my own devices, and then the horrifying fact begins to make itself clear: the things I give myself most readily to are the things I love, and the things I love when not living a life of grace can be unbeautiful indeed. Anger, rages, harsh and hateful words, resentments, ugly thoughts and urges and actions directed toward anything but the upbuilding of myself and others in the Lord: if I give myself readily to these things, if I make myself their servant and slave, are they not what I most love? How can I free myself from their bondage and sin? 

This was really a large part of the problem of the Israelites in the desert of Sinai, when through lack of faith they made themselves an idol to worship, as we see in today’s responsorial psalm: ‘Our fathers made a calf in Horeb / and adored a molten image; / They exchanged their glory / for the image of a grass-eating bullock.’ They gave themselves readily to what they most loved, in fact, creating a lifeless image of the worthless self-willed emptiness to which they ardently desired to prostrate themselves as slaves. They were a fine example of what St. Macarius of Egypt in one of his spiritual homilies would describe as ‘men with no foundation at all, a mere collection of impulses’. This Lent I might seriously ask myself this question: ‘Am I too a mere collection of random and disconnected impulses, experienced and acted upon to no divine purpose?’ If I am forced to answer this question in the affirmative to any degree at all, I would do well to take these pieces of spiritual advice, again from St. Ephrem: ‘Blessed is the person who has consented to become the close friend of faith and of prayer: he lives in single-mindedness and makes prayer and faith remain to reside with him.’ And: ‘Be constantly praying, day and night, as a ploughman who ploughs again and again, whose work is admirable. Do not be like the lazy ones in whose fields thorns grow. Be constantly praying, for he who loves prayer will find help in both worlds’